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This series, guest programmed by Ritika Kaushik and Sean Batton, explores the history of India and its fragmentations through a series of experimental shorts from the nation. Kaushik and Batton write: 

In this program, we bring together a montage of experimental films from India that reckon with the history of this nation and its fragmentations. Three were produced by Films Division of India, the country’s vehicle for documentary and public information films, at a moment when state funds were directed toward more idiosyncratic and subversive experiments, exemplified by Pramod Pati's psychedelic collage Explorer (1968). In My Dreams (1975), by the feminist novelist Ismat Chughtai, the Urdu poetry of Ali Sardar Jafri inspires a meditation on the utopian aspirations of Nehruvian... modernity on the cusp of its collapse into a period of authoritarianism, an event anticipated in Tyeb Mehta’s Koodal (1970). Referring to the Tamil word for “union” or “meeting point,” Koodal forms the core of our program as it brings together India’s past and present to reveal the dystopian violence beneath glossy hallucinations of progress. Ruchir Joshi’s Memories of Milk City (1991) reflects on the growing victimization of Muslims in Gujarat through a portrait of a city that has seen some of the worst communal violence in the nation’s history. We conclude the program with two films about memories under threat of disintegration: materially, as decaying, speckled, and ephemeral home movies in Ayisha Abraham’s You Are Here (2008), and as the recurring nightmares of filmmaker Mehdi Jahan’s aging mother—an Assamese Muslim woman contemplating the threat of erasure—in What would have been there, had there been nothing? (2023).

The event will be held on October 23rd at 7:30 PT. Tickets can be purchased here: Event TicketsLink opens in a new window